Sermon for 3 Easter - After the Virginia Massacre

I am sure we are all still reeling from the horror of the shootings at Virginia Tech this past week.... We are dealing with our raw emotions and grief, with our profound sadness and our seething anger.....How could we not be grief-stricken and sorrowful as we look at so many young faces, filled with hope and potential, as we hear of Engineering Professor Liviu Librescu who was a concentration camp survivor, and who according to students at Virginia Tech, barricaded the door of his classroom in Norris Hall with his body as Sueng-Hui Cho was shooting....Students credit Professor Librescu’s actions with saving some of their lives... “We heard the gunfire coming from the classroom behind us, and we just reacted to it and headed for the windows,” 22 year old student Caroline Meyers, related. “Professor Librescu never made an attempt to leave.”She reported that she and about 20 other students scrambled through the windows...Professor Librescu shouted for them to hurry. “He is a part of my life now and forever,” she said, “I’m changed. I’m not the person I was before Monday.” What a sad and tragic way to have a growing experience....You can’t help crying.... “Greater love hath no one this,” Jesus says in John’s Gospel, “than to lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).The Virginia Tech shootings have been very much on our minds and in our conversation on the St. Paul’s campus this week....At staff meeting on Tuesday, we began with prayer, as we always do, and also a reading from Scripture, from Micah 4, about the mountain of the Lord, when nations "will beat their swords into plowshares and turn their spears into pruning hooks....” (Micah 4:1-4).After the prayer and scripture reading, we spent some time talking about the Virginia Tech shootings, giving ourselves permission to share what we were feeling, what we were thinking about it, and also exploring how we as people of faith should respond....We had a similar time of reflection and conversation in the context of our worship before Wednesday’s Vestry meeting...It is important when things like this happen, for us to share our thoughts and feelings with others in community....Sharing aloud our thoughts and feelings with others in caring conversation allows us space to hear ourselves and to process what is in our minds...It allows others to help us inform ourselves about what is in our hearts and minds, so that we can put our finger on it more accurately, and channel our feelings in ways that are healthy.....This is the healing work of community....Consider how this contrasts with what we are discovering about Seung-Hui Cho, who is described as a loner, as sullen and angry, whose imbalance and rage was clearly manifested in rants and ravings in his writing and in the videos he sent to NBC News even as he was in the midst of his despicable acts... It is now clear that his pathological anger had been boiling beneath the surface for years, perhaps even, all his life....Seung-Hui’s conversations all took place inside his head and his rage and anger kept reinforcing itself, fueling him in his own distortions and sickness....It all boiled over Monday, and 33 people including Seung-Hui are dead and 20 plus more are wounded, and a whole community and a whole nation are wounded emotionally....In identifying my own feelings about the Virginia Tech massacre, I have been aware of my own anger and its complexities, which I am still processing....It is, I am sure, anger that is the product of deep sadness about the whole Virginia Tech situation and frustration at not feeling able to do much about it...Still, there are things I can and should do....It is important for us all to explore our feelings and emotional responses to the Virginia Tech shootings thoroughly and carefully...It is important for us to be self-aware, just as we should explore our feelings and emotions when we are affected by any global, national or personal event....Our emotions often drive our actions.....Right now many are sad and many are angry.....This sadness and this anger is informing behaviors....For some, and this is especially true for the Virginia tech community, the sadness is resulting in lethargy and depression, in inaction and paralysis, and this is understandable...They need some time and some space....Others are angry and in their anger, they are taking action - some by challenging Virginia Tech and Police officials about their responses, placing blame on them for what occurred......Others, by calling for greater gun control, arguing the Seung-Hui’s easy purchase of the two handguns and large quantities of ammunition contributed significantly to this tragedy....Still others are calling for easier access to guns for everyone, arguing that if the students and faculty at Virginia Tech had been armed, Seung-Hui would have been shot down before he got very far.....This latter argument is both very disturbing and highly problematic... Seung-Hui might well have been stopped sooner if students and faculty had been armed and this could have changed the outcome at Virginia Tech last Monday, but it would hardly contribute to a safer society and less gun deaths...The United States already has lax gun laws and we are among the most violent countries in the industrialized world. Our homicide rate is three times higher than Canada’s and more than four times higher than that of Germany, France and Great Britain.In 2004, the last year for which statistics are available from the Center for Disease Control, there were 29,569 gun deaths in the United States; 11,624 were homicides and 16,720 were suicides. Every two years, more Americans die from firearm deaths than died in the 8 year Vietnam War.....More guns and looser gun laws are not an appropriate or responsible reaction to the Virginia Tech massacre and our nation’s pathology of violence...a pathology that represents a profoundly moral issue for us and demands from us a Christian response....Of course, that’s another reason we in the faith community need to be thinking and talking about the Virginia Tech massacre.....Churches are communities of moral discourse...One of the questions asked of all us in the service of Holy Baptism during our re-commitment to the Baptismal Covenant is, “Will you persevere in resisting evil and whenever you fall into sin repent and return to the Lord?” (Book of Common Prayer - p. 304) We are also asked, “Will you strive for justice and peace among all people and respect the dignity of every human being?” (BCP - p. 305).These are questions about morality. They call for us to be intentional about acting morally in our own lives and also to be working toward a moral world....There is nothing easy about this...Conversations about morality are often complex....In an op-ed column which appeared in The New York Times on Thursday and in The Palm, Beach Post on Friday, Times columnist David Brooks considered the problem in his article titled “Mass Murder and Morality.” Brooks surveys the predictable pattern of analysis and questions that have and will continue to surround the Virginia Shootings and Cho Seung-Hui that as Brooks says will “pick apart his hatreds, his feelings of oppression and his dark war against the rich, Christianity and the world.”Brooks writes, “We could learn these or other things about Cho Seung-Hui [sic]. And as we learn the facts of his life, we’ll be able to fit them into ever more sophisticated models of human behavior.” “It is important knowledge,” Brooks writes, “but it has had the effect of reducing the scope of the human self.” Brooks continues, “In the realm of the new science, the individual is like a cork bobbing on the currents of giant forces: evolution, brain chemistry, stress and upbringing.” “Human consciousness,” he says, “is merely and epiphenomena of the deep controlling mental processes that lie within....Responsibility shifts outward from the individual to wider forces.”He continues, “People interviewed on TV tend to direct their anger at the gun, the university administration, society and so on. If they talk about the young killer at all, the socially acceptable word seems to be troubled. He’s more acted upon than acting.”Addressing what he refers to as the renegotiated “morality line,” Brooks writes, “The killings happened at a moment when the people who explain behavior by talking about biology, chemistry and social science are on the march while the people who explain behavior by talking about individual character are confused and losing ground.”Brooks understands that we neither can, nor should go backwards on this. As he states, “We’re not going to put our knowledge of brain chemistry or evolutionary psychology back in the bottle.” “It would be madness,” Brooks quite rightly observes, “to think that Cho Seung-Hui [sic] could have been saved from his demons by better sermons.”“But,” Brooks concludes, “it should be possible to acknowledge the scientists’ insights without allowing them to become monopolists. It should be possible to reconstruct some self-confident explanation for what happened at Virginia Tech that puts individual choice and moral responsibility closer to the center. There still seems to be such things as selves,” Brooks writes, “which are capable of making decisions and controlling destiny.....”I have some sympathy for Brooks’s argument, but in his desire to make Seung-Hui Cho the single focus of his consideration of the individual as the moral agent he loses sight of some important considerations. To begin with Cho Seung-Hui is dead, as are his 32 victims....We can isolate Seung-Hui and hold him accountable as a moral agent all we want....So what? How will that alter anything?I agree with Brooks’s premise, that individuals need to be responsible for their actions, but in his desire to try to focus our attention on Seung-Hui as an individual moral agent, Brooks diverts us from other individuals and individual decision making that I am confident share moral culpability.... Individuals, indeed, have enormous power and responsibility and individual decisions have tremendous effects....Brooks diverts us from the individual and societal decision making that has created a completely broken mental health system in our country....Safe mental health hospitals are difficult to find in this country....Committing people who need to be in them is nigh unto impossible....There are two places we place the severely mentally ill, including many that are dangerous. We place them in our prisons after they have already done harm. We also place them out on our streets....I know this from experience....Clergy have to deal with the mentally ill, including those that are dangerous, on a regular basis....As his history unfolds, the case of Seung-Hui Cho is a clear example of a person who should have been subject to long term commitment. That the mental health system in this country is the way it is and is such that Seung-Hui Cho and others who are a danger to themselves and to society are not put away to protect them and others is a consequence of individual decision making at many levels and the individuals who make these decisions and the society that tolerates them bear some of the responsibility for the Virginia tech shootings....When individuals make the decision that horrifyingly graphic, violent movies and video games are appropriate entertainment for any segment of society, and when these same individuals make a particular determination to market these to adolescent boys, that is a moral decision by individuals in those companies as well as their sponsors that contributes to the enculturation of boys and men into a world of violence.My guess is that this had a role to play in the desensitizing of Seung-Hui Cho...I will be interested in hearing what movies he watched, what music he listened to and what video games he played...I am willing to bet that they are all in wide circulation and very popular and especially among today’s adolescent and young adult male population....When individuals contribute to perpetuating images of “manliness” that emphasizes brutality and anger and the use of force to market such enterprises as the National Football League, the National Hockey League, the National Basketball Association, the World Wrestling Federation and the like, these are moral decisions made by individuals, executives of today’s corporations, that say to boys and men, violence and anger are normative for you and you have permission to act on these...I am not criticizing the sports so much as I am criticizing how they are marketed, although it is worth noting that in all instances, it has appeared to me that these sports in recent years have been played with a much greater emphasis on violence and hard hitting and with less emphasis placed on skill and technique. Today’s NBA games look more like a street fight under the basket, than a sport...The “in-your face” trash talk after an NFL tackle or sack underscores ugliness, not sportsmanship....When we, as individual consumers, make the decision to purchase violent games and movies, or allow their purchase, when we support these sports enterprises and their sponsors without recognizing the psychic harm they are doing to us all and fail to demand that the executives and corporations behind be held accountable for this harm, then we are acting as individual moral agents and are, ourselves, accountable.....The Virginia Tech shootings, the violence of our society, and most particularly the degree to which our society is raising up angry boys to become angry men should alarm us and challenge us all as individual moral agents who have both power and freedom to act and to effect change....We need to ask better questions of ourselves and what we are doing as a society to ourselves....We also need to ask what God would have us do and where God would lead us....God’s desire for us and God’s leading way is not in the direction of more hatred and greater violence, both of today’s readings point to this.....In the first reading from Acts, Saul was breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord and we know from Paul’s own admission that he did these things.....But God in Christ stopped him in tracks on the Damascus Road, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” (Acts 9:4) It is interesting to note that, for Jesus, thr persecution of his followers is represents a persecution of himself....Christ called Saul to repudiate his ways of violence and God called him into a new way, the way of Jesus Christ, the way of service and sacrifice, and suffering for the sake of others.....The way and life of love....The Gospel reading was an account of the resurrected Jesus appearing to his disciples by the Sea of Tiberias, which is the Greek name of the Sea of Galilee....The disciples had retreated to their own region following Jesus’ death....They went to lick their wounds, to escape, to try and figure out what had gone wrong and begin to think about what they would do next with their lives....They are out on a boat fishing and not having a great deal of success. Jesus appears to them by the seaside, but they don’t know it’s him....He gives them a fishing tip, “throw the net on the other side.” They do this, and pull up a large net of fish....Then the “beloved disciple” of John’s Gospel recognizes it is Jesus....Peter throws some clothes on and jumps in the water...They all go to shore and share a meal with Jesus. And in the part of the story which we didn’t read, Jesus restores Peter’s status after his three denials, and calls him to serve him in a ministry of service and sacrifice saying to him three times, “Feed my sheep” (John 21:15-19).A signal message of Jesus’ entire ministry, a signal message made most clear in the resurrection, is that violence and hatred, murder and death do not represents God’s hopes and desires for his creation ever.....When, in his chilling video, Seung-Hui said, “and now I die like Jesus!” he was wrong.....His understanding of Jesus life and death was as twisted and distorted as the rest of his thinking and actions...When Jesus died, he was killed by others.....When Jesus died, he did not kill others.....When Jesus died it was for the sake of others...Seung-Hui Cho’s death bore absolutely no resemblance to Jesus’ death...If there was a life and death that bore any resemblance to that of Jesus it was Professor Librescu’s - a person upon whom violence, oppression, hatred and murder had been delivered, not just by Cho, but also by Nazi’s in his native Romania....When Jesus appears to his disciples after his crucifixion, it underscores the Gospel message that the anger and hatred of a violent mob, the despicable brutality of the cross, the evil intentions of those who would hurt are neither the way of God, nor have final power over God or final say in God’s creation....God gets the final say and love is the final way....That’s the Good News of Easter....The Christian faith is grounded in reality....Evil exists, violence is real....The cross testifies to this....The shootings at Virginia Tech testify to this.....But though, at times, they may seem ascendent, they are not triumphant....Life and love are to triumph even if they must endure the horrors of Good Fridays to get there....There was great anguish on Good Friday...There is great anguish at Virginia Tech and throughout our nation today...But as the grief stricken disciples were encountered by the risen Christ, experienced him, ate with him, and then regrouped and went out into their world with a message of hope and love that challenged the brutal ugliness of Good Friday and the Cross; as they asked better questions about God and God’s ways; so we too are encountered by the risen Christ among us. So too we eat with him as we go to the altar for communion. So too we experience him as he manifested among us...In the face of what happened at Virginia Tech last Monday, God calls us to regroup, to ask better questions about the nature of God and God’s ways and God calls us as people of faith to go out with a message of hope and love that challenges the awfulness of last Monday, that convicts the evil of Seung-Hui Cho and his actions and also the society that produced him and them, our society....Above all, God calls us to go forth and proclaim the Gospel message of that first Easter and every Easter. Weeping has spent the night (Psalm 30:5), evil sat down at Virginia Tech, but it does not triumph. It cannot win the day. Easter wins the day...God’s resurrection power and hope and love win the day...They always win the day, yesterday and today and tomorrow! Thanks be to God.